“You said what?!”: foreign donations to political parties are legal in Australia

Hua Daodao, a deputy editor in the Huanqiu Shibao‘s commentary department, has written a piece offering useful insights into how the Australian media’s latestexposés of CCP overseas political activities looks from within China.

Being a good patriot, Hua summarily brushes aside all the allegations (which incidentally i tend to think are more an indictment of Australian complacency than anything else) but the article seems to have struck a chord with many politically-engaged Chinese young people, being passed around quite widely on WeChat.

One highlight is the extensive comments from Lei Xiying, an energetic pro-CCP activist who says the Australian media have subjected him to “Cultural Revolution style persecution.”

Specifically, he complains about the labels “nationalist” and “ultranationalist” being used in previous Australian coverage of his public activities and works.

Given the prominence of various kinds of enemies of China in Lei’s work, i think it’s fair to call him a “nationalist.” But “ultranationalist” isn’t accurate, as there are many far more extreme, even outright militaristic, participants in Chinese national identity and foreign policy discourse.

In fact, last year in the wake of the unfavourable South China Sea arbitration result, when the government made clear that it did not want street protests or KFC boycotts, Lei worked to discredit this type of nationalist action as anti-China false-flag troublemaking.

What Lei really is, openly and proudly, is a pro-CCP ideological warrior, who views China as beset by foreign plots to infiltrate its government and manipulate public opinion — a near-perfect mirror image of what the CCP and its “agents” now stand accused of in Australia. This grim irony will presumably pass unnoticed by nationalists on all sides of the ideological war.